The Space Hardware Club of University of
Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) has been flying a number of unique high-altitude
balloon experiments. The club members meet two nights each week to work on
their experiments and often launch a couple of balloons each semester. One
of their payloads last year consisted of human and mouse nerve cells in an
environmental chamber to see the effects of a trip into the stratosphere.
The cells survived! UAH also flies Balloonsats as part of the electrical
engineering senior design class, but the Space Hardware Club (SHC) is
unique in that students of any major can participate.

This past fall on a beautiful October day the
SHC students launched a high-definition camcorder that also downlinked
live video. The fast-scan amateur television (ATV) transmitter section
(see photo 1) put out 3 watts on the 70-cm band into a horizontally
polarized Little Wheel antenna. In addition, there were several APRS
(Automatic Packet Reporting System) transmitters on 144.39 and 144.34 MHz
for tracking the balloon’s position during flight.

The calm winds allowed a picture-perfect
liftoff (see photos 2 and 3) as the students watched their payload rise
high above Huntsville, Alabama. Barry Lankford, N4MSJ, brought his
portable ATV receiver and antenna to watch the video during the flight
(see photo 4). In addition, the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE)
department at UAH has allowed the Space Hardware Club to set up a great
ground station in a room on the second floor that has roof access for
their antenna system. The az/el rotor system combined with some custom
programming of their ground-station computer allows the antenna to track
the balloon by decoding the APRS downlinked position and altitude,
calculating the azimuth and elevation bearings and automatically steering
the antennas toward the balloon throughout the flight (photo 5).

This first flight of their ATV system had some
antenna problems (the Little Wheel had been beaten up pretty badly during
a number of earlier missions), so only a few minutes of live ATV signals
were received. However, they did get some beautiful high-definition video
recorded on the camcorder’s memory card.